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Working Paper
Measuring counterparty credit exposure to a margined counterparty
Firms active in OTC derivative markets increasingly use margin agreements to reduce counterparty credit risk. Making several simplifying assumptions, I use both a quasi- analytic approach and a simulation approach to quantify how margining reduces counterparty credit exposure. Margining reduces counterparty credit exposure by over 80 percent, using baseline parameter assumptions. I show how expected positive exposure (EPE) depends on key terms of the margin agreement and the current mark-to-market value of the portfolio of contracts with the counterparty. I also discuss a possible shortcut ...
Working Paper
Is corporate governance ineffective in emerging markets?
I test whether corporate governance is ineffective in emerging markets by estimating the link between CEO turnover and firm performance for over 1,200 firms in eight emerging markets. I find two main results. First, CEOs of emerging market firms are more likely to lose their jobs when their firm's performance is poor, suggesting that corporate governance is not ineffective in emerging markets. Second, for the subset of firms with a large domestic shareholder, there is no link between CEO turnover and firm performance. For this subset of emerging market firms, corporate governance appears to ...
Journal Article
An international survey of stress tests
In the summer of 2000, central banks from the Group of Ten countries surveyed large international banks about their use of stress tests_a risk management tool that measures a firm's exposure to extreme movements in asset prices. The survey findings highlight the risks that most concern financial institutions and clarify how these institutions use stress tests in their overall risk management programs.
Working Paper
Incorporating event risk into value-at-risk
Event risk is the risk that a portfolio's value can be affected by large jumps in market prices. Event risk is synonymous with "fat tails" or "jump risk". Event risk is one component of "specific risk", defined by bank supervisors as the component of market risk not driven by market-wide shocks. Standard Value-at-Risk (VaR) models used by banks to measure market risk do not do a good job of capturing event risk. In this paper, I discuss the issues involved in incorporating event risk into VaR. To illustrate these issues, I develop a VaR model that incorporates event risk, which I call ...
Working Paper
\"Big Bang\" deregulation and Japanese corporate governance: a survey of the issues
The "Big Bang" deregulation of Japanese financial markets focuses on financial modernization. I argue that financial modernization is of secondary importance for improving the performance of the Japanese economy. A key long-term issue facing Japan is to maintain its high level of per capita income in the face of an aging population and slower productivity growth. To achieve this, it is important to increase the return earned on Japan's large stock of wealth. I argue the low return on wealth reflects characteristics of the Japanese corporate governance system. The proper focus of the Big ...
Working Paper
Long-term banking relationships in general equilibrium
I examine the relationship between a financial intermediary ("bank") and a borrowing firm in a three-period overlapping generations model. The model can accommodate two financing arrangements between the bank and the firm: one requires commitment to a long-term contract, the other does not. Which arrangement is chosen depends on whether such a commitment can be credibly made. After defining the two arrangements, I compare their features with real-world financial dealings. Once the form of the long-term relationship between the bank and the firm is set, investment and output of the economy ...
Working Paper
Understanding the risk of synthetic CDOs
Synthetic collateralized debt obligations, or synthetic CDOs, are popular vehicles for trading the credit risk of a portfolio of assets. Following a brief summary of the development of the synthetic CDO market, I draw on recent innovations in modeling to present a pricing model for CDO tranches that does not require Monte Carlo simulation. I use the model to analyze the risk characteristics of the tranches of synthetic CDOs. The analysis shows that although the more junior CDO tranches -- equity and mezzanine tranches -- typically contain a small fraction of the notional amount of the CDO's ...
Working Paper
The implications of risk management information systems for the organization of financial firms
Financial dealer firms have invested heavily in recent years to develop information systems for risk measurement. I take it as given that technological progress is likely to continue at a rapid pace, making it less expensive for financial firms to assemble risk information. I look beyond questions of risk measurement methodology to investigate the implications of risk management information systems. By examining several theoretical models of the firm in the presence of asymmetric information, I explore how a financial firm's capital budgeting, incentive compensation, capital structure, and ...
Working Paper
Improving grid-based methods for estimating value at risk of fixed-income portfolios
Jamshidian and Zhu (1997) propose a discrete grid method for simplifying the computation of Value at Risk (VaR) for fixed-income portfolios. Their method relies on two simplifications. First, the value of fixed income instruments is modeled as depending on a small number of risk factors chosen using principal components analysis. Second, they use a discrete approximation to the distribution of the portfolio's value. We show that their method has two serious shortcomings which imply it cannot accurately estimate VaR for some fixed-income portfolios. First, risk factors chosen using principal ...
Working Paper
Evaluating forecasts of correlation using option pricing
A forecast of the correlation between two asset prices is required to price or hedge an option whose payoff depends on both asset prices or to measure the risk of a portfolio whose return depends on both asset prices. However, a number of factors make it difficult to evaluate forecasts of correlation. We develop a forecast evaluation methodology based on option pricing, extending a technique that Engle et al. (1993) introduced to evaluate volatility forecasts. A forecast of the variance-covariance matrix of joint asset returns is used to generate a trading strategy for a package of simulated ...